The Vanaspati Lesson
Meera always tells the same story when the conversation turns to consumer trust.
Her grandmother cooked with Dalda for forty years without a second thought.
It was positioned as a ghee alternative: the real thing, just more affordable. Her grandmother trusted it the way you trust anything that has always been there: completely, without question. The brand made a promise. The community repeated it. And in the absence of any information to the contrary, the promise held.
Then, the information caught up with marketing. The truth (that Dalda was hydrogenated vegetable oil, processed in ways that bore little resemblance to the ghee it claimed to replace) eventually became common knowledge. Not because of a government announcement or a viral scandal. Just because information, over time, finds its way to the surface.
Transparency didn’t arrive through a single exposé. As health awareness and labelling norms evolved, consumers gradually realised Dalda was hydrogenated vegetable oil, not traditional ghee. This shift coincided with rising awareness of trans fats, regulatory changes, and a broader move towards “heart-healthy” oils.
Meera’s grandmother wasn’t foolish. She was simply operating in a world where the information asymmetry between brands and consumers was vast, and almost entirely in the brand’s favour:
- Brands knew what was in the tin
- Consumers knew what the ad said
For decades, that gap was wide enough to build entire businesses inside.
What’s changed isn’t consumer intelligence. It’s the velocity of information. The same shift that eventually caught up with Dalda is now happening to every brand in every category: not over decades, but over weeks. Sometimes days. Sometimes hours after launch.
The vanaspati lesson isn’t a cautionary tale about a different era. It’s a preview of what happens to any brand that mistakes a trusted claim for a verified one.
The 10.4 Touchpoint Economy
Here’s a number that should be pinned to every marketing strategy deck: 10.4.
That’s the average number of sources a consumer consults before making a purchase decision in widely cited early studies of modern research behaviour. According to Google’s Zero Moment of Truth research, the average shopper used 5.3 information sources in 2010 and 10.4 in 2011, nearly doubling in a single year. Later work and industry reports suggest shoppers still consult around 9–10 sources before buying, especially in considered categories.
The more important shift isn’t the number. It’s the sequence.
Research used to happen after purchase, often as buyer’s remorse or word-of-mouth feedback passed slowly through social networks. Today, research happens before: sometimes weeks before. And the journey looks nothing like a funnel:
- See ad
- Open tabs
- Read reviews
- Watch YouTube
- Check Reddit
- Compare alternatives
- Wishlist
- Return three days later
- Read more reviews
- Buy (or not buy, and search somewhere else)
The consumer decision cycle, which used to be measured in seconds at the point of sale, now plays out across hours, sessions, and platforms. A TV spot or a billboard is no longer the primary input. It’s Step 1 in a 10-step verification process.
The critical implication: most of those 10.4 touchpoints are not brand-controlled.
A consumer might encounter your brand through your ad, but they’ll form their opinion of it through:
- A Reddit thread you didn’t write
- A YouTube review you didn’t commission
- A one-star rating you didn’t see coming
The brand controls the first impression. Consumers control the verdict.
Three Eras of Marketing
To understand where we are, it helps to understand where we’ve been.
Traditional India ran on word of mouth and local trust. Consumers bought what the community endorsed, what the local shopkeeper recommended, what had been in the household for generations. Truth revealed itself slowly, during use, and privately. A bad product would lose a customer, but the damage was contained.
The liberalisation era (roughly the 1990s through 2010) gave us the interruptive advertising model at scale. Celebrity endorsements, emotional campaigns, mass media reach. Consumers largely trusted what they saw: if Amitabh Bachchan used it, it was probably fine. Truth still revealed itself mostly after purchase, and still mostly privately. The information asymmetry remained intact.
The digital era is where we live now. And it operates on entirely different logic.
- Old model: interrupt attention, make pitch, ask for trust
- New model: earn permission through proof, let customers verify independently, and get chosen
The difference isn’t tactical. It’s structural.
What’s emerged on top of permissive marketing is a third layer: UGC verification. Customers don’t just read brand content and third-party reviews anymore. They read each other. Real experiences, shared publicly, validate or contradict every claim a brand makes. And they do it before the purchase, not after.
The era of asking consumers to trust you is over. The era of giving them no reason not to has begun.
The Trust Gap
The data here is worth sitting with.
According to the Edelman Trust Barometer India 2024, people place significantly more trust in peers and experts than in advertising. Put simply:
- Only a minority of consumers say they trust advertising
- A much larger share trusts “people like me” (peer reviews, forum posts, community conversations)
- An even larger share trusts technical experts (dermatologists on YouTube, nutritionists on Instagram, engineers stress-testing products on camera)
Let that first point land for a moment. Across the industry, after decades of refinement in targeting, creative, storytelling, and media placement, most people don’t automatically trust what we put out.
The translation is uncomfortable but important: your ad gets attention. Independent voices close the sale.
This isn’t an argument against advertising. It’s an argument for understanding advertising’s actual role. Supporting data from multiple studies reinforces this:
- A large majority of Indian online shoppers read reviews before purchasing
- Many won’t even consider a product without a strong rating profile
- Searches for “honest review” have grown sharply year-on-year in India
Consumers aren’t avoiding brand content. They’re contextualising it. They see your ad, they note the claim, and then they go find out if it’s true.
The gap between where brands spend and where consumers decide is the most expensive inefficiency in modern marketing.
Transparency Across Categories
Every category has its own black box: the thing customers historically had to trust blindly. The brands winning today are the ones systematically opening those boxes and turning visibility into differentiation.
Food and Beverage
The black box: what’s actually inside?
Brands like The Whole Truth have built entire identities around the answer: no asterisks, no “natural flavours” without explanation. The ingredient list becomes the marketing. Yoga Bar and similar brands take a comparable approach: macros and ingredients front and centre, less buried behind vague terms.
Meat and Fresh Produce
The black box: hygiene, freshness, cold chain integrity.
Brands in this space highlight quality checks, standardised processes, and traceability. Licious, for instance, has consistently communicated its quality-check protocols. Country Delight puts timestamps on deliveries and emphasises freshness. These aren’t just product features; they’re answers to questions the consumer was already asking privately.
Fashion and Apparel
The black box: manufacturing, material quality, and the uncomfortable question of why a product costs what it costs.
Brands that have opened this box with factory walk-throughs, cost breakdowns, and construction videos have built loyalty that discounting alone rarely achieves. Bewakoof, for example, treats unfiltered customer reviews as a visible part of its experience, leaning into transparency around real customer feedback.
Furniture and Home
The black box: comfort and durability promises that historically couldn’t be verified until you were already committed.
Wakefit’s 100-night trial isn’t just a customer-friendly policy; it’s a transparency play. The message: we’re confident enough in our product to let you verify the claim yourself, in your own home, before you commit.
Financial Services
The black box: hidden fees, fine print, complexity that feels hard to decode.
Zerodha’s brokerage calculator, which shows what you’ll pay before you sign up, is as much a brand decision as a product one. So are the plain-language interfaces and communication styles of newer-age banking apps like Jupiter and Fi.
The categories are different. The principle is identical: find what your customer has to trust blindly, then make it visible.
The brands that do this first in any category tend to set the standard that everyone else is eventually expected to meet. That’s not altruism. It’s competitive positioning.
Find what your customer has to trust blindly, then make it visible.
The Conversation-First Play
Some of the most sophisticated brand-building happening in Indian D2C right now doesn’t start with a product. It starts with a conversation.
The logic: consumers are significantly more receptive to paid media once they’ve already encountered the brand organically—in a community discussion, a creator’s candid post, an honest problem-solution narrative. The brand doesn’t feel imposed upon them. It feels discovered.
Take Underneat (co-founded by Kusha Kapila) as a case study in sequencing. Before aggressive product promotion, the brand built a narrative around body comfort and realistic fit expectations. It sparked genuine conversations about the shapewear experience:
- The discomfort that products often don’t acknowledge
- The gap between marketing imagery and real bodies
- The disconnect between what products have traditionally promised and what they delivered
This matters strategically because it reframes the relationship between organic and paid. The new launch sequence:
- Build a conversation around the problem
- Establish credibility in that conversation
- Introduce the product as a solution
- Scale with advertising
Advertising’s role in this model is not to create belief. It’s to remind people of a belief they’ve already formed. That’s a more efficient use of media spend, and a more defensible brand position.
Then the UGC Arrived
Here’s the challenge with building hype before building proof: your customers will share their experiences anyway, whether you plan for it or not.
For decades, customer experiences were essentially private. Someone had a bad experience, told a few friends, and the damage was localised. The feedback loop was slow. Brands had time to respond, adapt, manage.
Today, every customer is a potential content creator with distribution:
- A sizing inconsistency can become an Instagram story that reaches a hundred thousand people by morning
- A quality concern can become a Reddit thread that sits in search results permanently
- A price-value mismatch can become a YouTube video that outranks your own marketing
The data is consistent across studies:
- A large majority of consumers say user-generated content (UGC) significantly impacts their purchasing decisions
- UGC often outperforms traditional influencer content on perceived authenticity and impact
- Most marketers agree that consumers trust customer content over brand content
Returning to the Underneat example: the launch narrative was powerful and genuinely well-received. The marketing was applauded. The conversation felt earned. And then, like with any modern D2C brand, customers started posting: sharing their experiences with sizing, fit, and price comparisons with alternatives.
The brand-controlled story met user-generated truth. The space between the two became part of the story.
This isn’t unique to any single brand. It’s the pattern.
Many beauty and personal-care brands, for instance, build an identity around propositions like “made for Indian skin tones” or “visible results from the first use.” UGC then adds nuance—highlighting shade range preferences, timelines for visible results, or how products behave on different hair and skin types.
The accountability structure has changed fundamentally:
UGC turned customer experience into permanent, searchable, public record.
The implication for strategy is profound. Product quality is no longer a downstream concern that marketing manages around. It’s a prerequisite for marketing to function at all. Because if the product and the promise diverge, customers will talk about it in places your next potential customer can see before they see your ad.
The Performance Transparency Trap
Transparency has become one of the most used words in modern marketing. And consumers are learning to spot the difference between real transparency and the appearance of it.
Transparency Fatigue
When every brand claims to be “honest,” “clean,” “transparent,” or “no hidden anything,” the words lose their signal value. The claim becomes noise. Consumers who’ve had mixed experiences with brands that said the right things but delivered inconsistently have developed increasingly sophisticated filters.
The Verification Arms Race
Savvy consumers now:
- Screenshot claims and compare them to reviews
- Join WhatsApp and Telegram groups specifically for sharing brand experiences
- Follow creators whose entire proposition is fact-checking and stress-testing marketing
Brands are no longer competing for attention alone. They’re competing for believability. And believability has a much shorter half-life than attention.
Selective Transparency
A subtler problem is being transparent about some things while under-explaining others.
- Transparent about ingredients? Often yes.
- Honest about realistic timelines and trade-offs? Less consistently.
A sulfate-free shampoo can list clean ingredients truthfully while not emphasising the 2–3 week adjustment period many users go through. A fitness brand can be transparent about calories while setting optimistic expectations about the speed of results.
Real transparency means being honest about:
- Trade-offs
- Timelines
- Who the product is not for
That last one is the hardest, because marketing has often been about expansion. But a brand that says “this product takes 6 weeks to show results and isn’t ideal for X skin type” may lose a few prospects upfront and gain far fewer disappointed reviews later.
Interruptive vs. Permissive
The framework that makes sense of all of this is simpler than it appears.
Interruptive Marketing (the old model)
- Philosophy: interrupt attention, make the pitch, ask for trust
- Tactics: TV ads, print, billboards, celebrity endorsements
- Success metric: how many people did we interrupt?
- When it worked: when consumers had limited alternative information sources to verify the pitch against
Permissive Marketing (the model that actually works now)
- Philosophy: earn permission through proof, let consumers verify independently, get chosen
- Tactics: educational content, reviews, comparisons, proof points
- Success metric: how many people investigated us and still chose us?
- Why it works: Consumers verify almost everything now
The critical difference is not tactical. It’s about control.
- Interruptive marketing controls when you see the message
- Permissive marketing earns the right to be in your consideration set, then has to survive what happens after
Legacy brands that have adapted understand this:
- Asian Paints: colour visualiser tools, room guides, planning content. These aren’t just brand extensions; they’re permissive marketing infrastructure.
- Dove: Real Beauty resonates because it sits alongside a long-running focus on product suitability and representation, not just a single creative idea.
These aren’t D2C brands. They’re adaptive brands.
And the reverse is equally true. Brands that began as proof-heavy, community-first players sometimes drift towards more traditional, celebrity-driven advertising as they scale. The D2C label alone doesn’t protect anyone. Adapting to how decisions actually get made does.
The YouTube Verification Layer
If there’s a single channel that has restructured consumer decision-making more than any other in the past five years in India, it’s YouTube.
The numbers point in the same direction across multiple sources:
- Searches containing “review” have grown rapidly year-on-year
- Searches containing “honest review” have grown even faster
- Industry and platform data indicate that around half of Indian consumers watch review videos before purchasing in electronics, beauty, and F&B categories
The trust hierarchy that has emerged:
- Brand’s own “first impression” video: low trust
- Paid influencer haul or launch collaboration: medium-low trust
- Independent “3-month honest review” from a creator with no visible brand relationship: high trust
- Dermatologist or technical expert systematically evaluating claims: highest trust
Brands overwhelmingly invest in level 2. Consumers increasingly rely on levels 3 and 4.
The content brands don’t control influences decisions more than the content they do. And the gap is widening as consumers become more sophisticated about identifying sponsored content and affiliate arrangements.
The practical implication: advertising’s role in the consumer journey has been demoted. It used to be the primary information source and the mechanism of trust. Now it’s Step 1 in a verification process that plays out across platforms you don’t control, with voices you didn’t pay for.
Advertising introduces. Everything else adjudicates. The brands that understand this design their advertising to earn the investigation, not to close it.
“You cannot advertise your way into trust. You can only advertise your way into consideration, and then UGC determines the outcome.”
What This Means for Strategy
The new marketing sequence isn’t complicated, but it requires a fundamental reordering of priorities.
Step 1: Build product credibility before building product awareness
- Solve a real problem
- Create early users who genuinely love the product
- Critical: The product experience should be ready for UGC scrutiny before you scale
The pressure to launch and grow quickly pushes brands to scale advertising before they’ve established proof. The result: a brand that buys its way into consideration and then can lose it to UGC.
Step 2: Generate organic validation before scaling paid media
- Encourage UGC from early customers
- Engage communities where your audience discusses the problem you solve
- Build a proof ecosystem (reviews, expert perspectives, honest creator content) before putting significant budget behind amplification
The advertising has to have something to amplify.
Step 3: Use paid media to scale awareness, not substitute for trust
- Advertising is the megaphone for trust already earned
- It is not a mechanism for creating trust that doesn’t exist yet
The shift in advertising’s role:
AI-driven review summaries in search and marketplaces now collapse thousands of UGC data points into a single snippet. That makes alignment between product reality and public narrative even more non-negotiable, because discrepancies surface faster and at scale.
The brands that will build durable market positions are not the ones with the best creative or the highest media budgets. They’re the ones whose products closely match their promises, so UGC becomes an asset rather than a liability.
The Media Ant Connection
There’s a parallel worth drawing explicitly, because it completes the loop.
Just as consumers now ask “what exactly is inside this product?” — advertisers are increasingly asking “what exactly am I buying in this media placement?”
For years, media buying was complex in ways that had little to do with intent. Options were fragmented, pricing required negotiation, and comparing channels meant relying on relationships rather than data. The information gap wasn’t a design choice — it was structural. And it had one quiet consequence: it kept smaller brands out.
That asymmetry is now being dismantled in exactly the same way consumer information asymmetry was. The Media Ant’s mission — empowering every brand, regardless of size or budget, to advertise with the same clarity once reserved for large spenders — is the structural answer to the same problem. Ant10, its AI planning tool trained on 10,000+ campaigns, is one expression of this: a brand with a ₹25 lakh budget can now get a data-backed media plan across 50+ channels in under 30 seconds.
Consumers moved from faith-based buying to verification-based buying as information became accessible. Advertisers are making the same journey, for the same reason. The brands winning consumer trust today by being transparent about their products are the same ones demanding that clarity from their media partners.
The cycle is complete.
Trust Is Verified, Not Claimed
For most of modern marketing history, the job was simpler than it is now:
- A jingle
- A celebrity endorsement
- An emotionally resonant campaign
That was enough. Information travelled slower than advertising. By the time truth caught up with a claim, the sale was already made.
That era is over.
Today:
- Information travels faster than advertising
- Consumers verify claims in minutes
- Customer experiences become public record within hours
- One piece of honest UGC, positive or negative, can reframe months of carefully crafted positioning
Your ad might introduce your brand. But YouTube reviews, Reddit threads, and Instagram stories from real customers determine the sale. And you cannot control those voices. You can only deserve them.
The brands that will win the next decade are:
- Not the ones that speak loudest, but the ones that explain clearest
- Not the ones with the most creative campaigns, but the ones whose products match their promises
- Not the ones that manage the narrative, but the ones whose products earn the defence
Because in the verification economy, trust is no longer assumed. Trust is no longer claimed. Trust is verified by customers who have no obligation to protect your narrative.
Your customers are your real marketers now, whether you pay them or not, whether you like it or not. The only question is: when they post about you, what will they say?
